Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 13

Today is Blog Action Day 2009. This is an annual event, held every October 15, with a goal of encouraging an outpouring of simultaneous comment on an important issue calling for global action. This year, the designated subject is climate change.

Back in January, I wrote a blog post summarizing my position on climate change. Entitled Pascal's Wager and Climate Change, the post makes the argument that even if you're a skeptic about climate change or humanity's role in causing it, the risks of ignoring the issue are great, and the benefits from addressing it are significant even if scientists are completely wrong about the causes. What I wrote in January still seems sound, so please go back to the original post, linked above, to review my argument and the vibrant comment thread.

In the meantime, here are a couple of my favorite climate-change related resources:

• Greenmonk. Greenmonk is a good blog, but I also love their mission of providing advisory services to companies trying to develop climate change strategies.

• RealClimate, which bills itself as providing "Climate science from climate scientists", and delivers.

• energyliteracy.com, a site created by my son-in-law Saul Griffith to help people understand the math and engineering concepts around energy use and climate change. It's amazing how many people talk about the issue without understanding the basic units with which energy is measured. Wattzon is another site that Saul created to help people quantify the energy they use. From what I can see, users way under-report their actual energy consumption, but the ideas, presentations, and posts on the site are extraordinarily informative.

• Worldchanging, a site that doesn't just cover climate change, but focuses on technologies and practices with positive global impact.

Feel free to supply additional links (pro- and con-) in the comments. And if you care about the issue (you should!), write your own Blog Action Day post.

Four short links: 4 September 2009

Flood Maps, Govt Permalinks, Ops, and Security

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Flood Maps -- what the world will look like when the oceans rise. Interactive, so you can dial up your preferred level of environmental horror. (via Hans Nowak)
2. Citability -- making government accessible, reliable, and transparent with advanced permalinks, as Government websites are ever changing and cannot be cited. Content changes without notice or accountability.
3. Bootstrapping EC2 Images as Puppet Clients -- This is a post on how to get to the point of using Puppet in an EC2 environment, by automatically configuring EC2 instances as Puppet clients once they're launched. I've been learning that if you're using a cloud hosting service, you need an automated admin tool. (via Grig Gheorghiu). See also the APT repository for Chef.
4. USB Snoop Stick -- Trojan in a convenient form factor, malware on a stick, back doors in your pocket ... and best of all, it's sold to consumers.

Four short links: 10 Mar 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation Sets Up Its Own BitTorrent Tracker -- the money shot is not that they're using the same code as Pirate Bay, it's "By using BitTorrent we can reach our audience with full quality media files. Experience from our early tests show that if we’re the best provider of our own content we also gain control of it.". Finally, a broadcaster realizing that they have to jump into the conversation with customers even though they don't know how it ends. (via BoingBoing)
2. Sita Sings The Blues Released -- release of the movie that was mired in copyright strife, now freed under Creative Commons Attribute And No Damn DRM licensing. It still is copyright-entangled: some of the songs in the movie are restricted and if you want to reuse the songs in your reuse of the movie then you'll have to wrangle with the copyright overlords.
3. Crisis of Credit Explained in Infographics -- a great 10m movie explaining the whole disaster from cash to crash, with an infographic-meets-Flash-game feel to it. This is the future of educational films. I've embedded it below. (via Flowing Data)
4. Cowpox Smallpox -- very clear essay from Maciej Ceglowski about how the economic dramas and the climate dramas challenge our democracy in the same way. You might know Maciej from Argentina on two steaks a day or Dabblers and Blowhards. Complexity as a result of feedback loops caught my eye, as that's part of the talk I gave at Webstock, "Better Stronger Failures": "Feedback loops in the financial world are even worse, since the entities being modeled are aware of their behavior - and aware of the models being used to study them. Investors form strategies based not just on market conditions, but on their perceptions of others' perceptions of market conditions, and so on in a hall of mirrors effect. Any algorithm that can reliably predict the behavior of a financial market will be used by participants in that market to earn money, altering the system in a way that leaves you right back where you started. In this sense our ability to model economics will always be worse than our understanding of the weather, since we don't have to worry about a raindrop anticipating that it will hit the ground before it even forms, and taking steps to change the outcome."

The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Four short links: 4 Feb 2009

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 2

Data, climate change, and location:

1. Details on Yahoo's Distributed Database (Greg Linden) -- summary of Yahoo!'s PNUTS, "a massively parallel and geographically distributed database system for Yahoo!'s web applications." Greg keeps up with the papers from the search engine companies, and the insights he offers are great. For example, "Second, as figures 3 and 4 show, the average latency of requests to their database seems quite high, roughly 100 ms. This is high enough that web applications probably would incur too much total latency if they made a few requests serially (e.g. ask for some data, then, depending on what the data looks like, ask for some other data). That seems like a problem.".
2. Google Latitude -- app and service for mobile phones (G1, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian) and desktops, where your location is tracked and displayed on a map which you can share with your friends. Interesting use of the map to get some Dodgeball-like functionality, but without programmatic access it's less functional than FireEagle. I'm still not sure I really understand the use cases for this, and assume that over time it will evolve into something more practical.
3. Without Hot Air -- the full text of an excellent book on global warming is available. Well written and well thought. I look forward to the inevitable flood of foot-stamping carbon polluters harrumphing about flawed science and the inevitable final triumph of the flat earth geocentric cosmology.
4. Is Big Data at a Tipping Point? -- Tim pointed me to this a while ago, but I don't think he's blogged about it. Thesis is that as more and more open data gets out there, it'll eventually be cross-related into something big and useful. The author asks how close we are to that. If the premise is true (and I'm not sure I buy the phase change metaphor), I think we're definitely not going to be saying within 12 months "remember when we didn't have enough useful plentiful accurate mashable data? thank goodness those days are past!".

A Climate of Polarization

by Gavin Starks | comments: 10

Guest blogger Gavin Starks is founder and CEO of AMEE, a neutral aggregation platform designed to measure and track all the energy data in the world. Gavin has a background in Astrophysics and over 15 years Internet development experience.

We're all aware of the emotive language used to polarize the climate change debate.

There are, however, deeper patterns which are repeated across science as it interfaces with politics and media. These patterns have always bothered me, but they've never been as "important" as now.

We are entering an new era of seismic change in policy, business, society, technology, finance and our environment, on a scale and speed substantially greater than previous revolutions. The sheer complexity of these interweaving systems is staggering.

Much of this change is being driven by "climate science", and in the communications maelstrom there is a real risk that we further alienate "science" across the board.

We need more scientists with good media training (and presenting capability) to change the way that all sciences are represented and perceived. We need more journalists with deeper science training - and the time and space to actually communicate across all media. We need to present uncertainty clearly, confidently and in a way that doesn't impede our decision-making.

On the climate issue, there are some impossible levers to contend with;

1. Introducing any doubt into the climate debate stops any action that might combat our human impact.
2. Introducing "certainty" undermines our scientific method and its philosophy.

When represented in political, public and media spaces, these two levers undermine every scientific debate and lead to bad decisions.

Pascal's Wager is often invoked, and this is entirely reasonable in this case.

It is reasonable because of what's at stake: the risk of mass extinction events. If there is a probability that anthropogenic climate change will cause the predicted massive interventions in our ecosystem, then we have to act.

The nature of our actions must be commensurate with both the cause and the effect. The causes are many: population, production, consumption - as are the effects: war, poverty, scarcity, etc.

Our interventions will use all our means to address both cause and effect, and those actions will run deep.

Equally, we must allow science to do what it's designed to do: measure, model, analyse and predict.

From a scientific perspective we must allow more room for theories to evolve, otherwise we'll only prove what we're looking for.

However, if we ignore the potential need to act, the consequences are not something anyone will want to see.

It's not something we can fix later (for me, "geo-engineering" is not a fix, it's a pre-infected band-aid).

Given the massive complexity of the issues, and that - really - anthropogenic climate change is only one of many "peak consumption" issues that we face, there is no way we can accurately communicate all the arguments that would lead to mass understanding.

However, the complexity issues are no different from those we face in politics. They are not solvable, but they are addressable.

We can communicate the potential outcomes, and the decisions that individuals need to make in order to impact the causes.

Ultimately it's your personal choice.

My choice is based on my personal exposure to the science, business, data, policy, media, and broader issues around sustainability. That choice is to do my best to catalyse change as fast as I possibly can.

We all need to actively engage in improving communication, so that everyone - potentially everyone on Earth - can make informed choices about the future of the planet we inhabit.

--
Recommended reading:

http://www.realclimate.org/ is a great resource.

Today, the UK Government launched a campaign "to create a more science literate society, highlighting the science and technology based industries of the future"

Shai Agassi on Electric Cars

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 11

One of my favorite sessions at the recent Web 2.0 summit was Tim's half-hour conversation with Shai Agassi, the CEO of Better Place. Better Place aims to make electric cars widespread ("the electric car as the de facto standard") by addressing major issues that have held back electric vehicles: affordability and convenience.

In a relaxed conversation with Tim, Shai described an electric car industry that resembles the mobile phone business. Just as telecom companies sell mobile handsets at a discount if one is willing to commit to a contract, their subscription-based model will allow consumers to purchase an electric car at the fraction of the normal price. Car owners will pay additional fees based on the amount of miles they drive and the type of car they choose to own. To support their subscribers, Better Place will also build extensive networks of charging spots and battery exchange stations. They will build the first "Electric Recharge Grids" in Israel and Denmark.

Prior to starting Better Place, Shai was a president at software vendor SAP. The interview briefly touches on IT and enterprise computing.

[NOTE: Web 2.0 summit videos are available on YouTube.]

Why I Support Barack Obama

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 274

In my talks this year, I have been outlining some of the world's great problems, highlighting some of the things that are being done by technology innovators to solve them, and urging my listeners to "work on stuff that matters."

We are in unprecedented times. And folks, I'm sorry to say that the current financial meltdown is not the worst of it. Political instability around the world, wars over access to resources, and yes, terrorists, are all in our future. Scientists who've studied global warming agree that we're heading towards decades of extreme environmental stress, leading to even more severe economic disruptions than we have seen to date. Meanwhile, we have an aging population with ballooning healthcare costs, an unfair economy in which some people receive outsized gains while others fall behind, an educational system that is not preparing children for the future, and deficits that require an increasing percentage of our tax dollars to service debt to other countries. Even if there is a short term recovery, huge problems loom in the years ahead, problems we can no longer pass off to our children and grandchildren.

Faced with these problems, we need a president who can harness the best and brightest our country has to offer, a president who is conversant with, and comfortable with, the power of technology to assist in solving these problems, a president who is good at listening, studying, and devising solutions based on the best insight available, rather than on narrow ideology. We need a president who can forge consensus, not just among the partisans in our own fractured democracy but around the world. We need a president who can inspire our citizens and our global partners to forgo narrow self interest and embrace the possibilities that we can achieve if we work together to build a better future.

I believe Barack Obama is that president. He is a man of intelligence, but also a man whose character and temperament seem suited to the problems of our age: unflappable, optimistic even in the face of adversity, willing to speak the truth about subjects that have long been taboo (I'm thinking of his speech on race, and his speech on fatherhood) and with unscripted reactions that show his fundamental decency (I'm thinking of his reaction to those who wanted to make a campaign issue of Sarah Palin's daughter's unplanned pregnancy.)

Because this is a tech blog, not a political blog, though, I primarily want to address the subject of why members of the technical community should join me in supporting Barack Obama. (The New York Times has made a compelling case based on the broader issues, as has Colin Powell.) I outline four principal reasons:

1. Connected, Transparent Government
2. The Financial Crisis
3. Climate Change
4. Net Neutrality

I will also discuss some important additional considerations, personal and political, that I hope Radar readers who don't want to see politics in these pages, will forgive.

I want to be clear that this is my personal endorsement, and not an endorsement by O'Reilly Media. I'd like O'Reilly to be a company where people of all political persuasions are welcomed and supported, and feel free to express their personal opinions, as I have here.

(continue reading)

Web Meets World

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 35

My talk last week at Web 2.0 Expo in New York was entitled "Web Meets World." I covered this theme from two directions:

1. The idea that in the future, Web 2.0 "collective intelligence" applications will be driven by sensors rather than people typing on keyboards. What's more, this idea is also key to "enterprise 2.0." Dell's integrated supply chain, which takes real time demand feedback from purchasers, and sends that information all the way back to suppliers in a kind of autonomic process, is more Web 2.0, in many ways, than their heralded Dell Ideastorm initiative. The opportunity for big companies is to turn their IT departments from a back office operation into the brains of their enterprise, enabling autonomic response to constant stimuli from their users. Understanding what WalMart has in common with Google is more important than understanding how to apply Facebook to customer interaction.

2. The idea that the big problems facing us as a world renders the outsized focus of developers on lightweight consumer applications a bit silly. "Stop throwing sheep and focus on stuff that matters" was how CNet described this part of the talk, and that's probably a fair summary. In retrospect, though, I realize I need to make the connection between the two parts of the talk clearer: there's a huge contribution that Web 2.0 techniques can make specifically to the world's biggest problems. Instedd's approach to early detection of infectious diseases, Ushahidi's approach to crowdsourcing crisis information, Witness's harnessing of consumer video to report on human rights abuses, and AMEE's APIs for exchanging carbon data between applications, are all part of the "instrumenting the world" trend that I was talking about in part one of the talk. And in classic "watching the alpha geeks" fashion, they are a key part of the early warning signs that have led me to conclude that this is the next big trend. As I delivered the talk in New York, I think I failed to make the connection as explicit as I should have.

Here's the video of the talk. Let me know what you think.

One more question: at the end of the talk, I urged everyone to register to vote, and to take the election seriously. In the course of making that request, I let my personal politics show (I am a strong Obama supporter.) Most people in the audience seemed enthusiastic, but some have complained about politics intruding at a tech conference. What do you think? (I think that the current election is going to have a huge effect on our future, and is very much grist for Radar. But I'd love to hear arguments, pro and con.)

America's Capacity for Change

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 30

Peggy Noonan wrote a lovely few paragraphs celebrating America, in the middle of an otherwise somewhat nasty editorial about Hillary Clinton.

A friend sent, by instant message, the AP flash that ran at 16:56 ET on 06-03-2008. There it was suddenly on my screen:

"*** WASHINGTON (AP)—Obama clinches Democratic nomination, making him first black candidate to lead his party."

A great old-school bulletin, and of course it carried a huge and moving message. It is good when barriers fall; it's good when possibilities seem to open up to more people, especially the young, who are always watching....

But what I thought of when the friend sent the flash was something another friend told me months ago. It was the night Mr. Obama won Alabama. My friend was watching on TV, in his suburban den. His 10-year-old daughter walked in, looked, saw "Obama Wins" and "Alabama." She said, "Daddy, we saw a documentary on Martin Luther King Day in school." She said, "That's where they used the hoses." Suddenly my friend saw it new. That's the place they used the water hoses on the civil rights marchers crossing the bridge. And now look. The black man thanking Alabama for his victory.

What kind of place makes a change like this? Only a great nation. We should love it tenderly every day of our lives.

I was having a similar thought the other day, but not about the evolution of our consciousness of race in America, wonderful though that is. I was delighting that, however far we swing from the center, the fact that our presidents can only serve two terms gives us a fresh start. In the dark days of the past seven years, when the possibility of stolen elections as well as misguided policies and even lies leading us into an unnecessary war might lead anyone to think that democracy was on its last legs in America, one might never have thought to be where we are today, with the real possibility of change in Washington. Even on the Republican side, the party outsider, the voice of criticism (at least initially) has become the candidate. How great is it that we allow ourselves to change direction like this?

The momentousness of change in leadership every eight years has been on my mind recently as a result of reading Jay Winik's book, The Great Upheaval, about the simultaneous change of political consciousness that wracked the world in the US, France, and Russia (though there it didn't prevail) in the late eighteenth century. One of the most stirring moments was the story about how George III reacted when he heard that George Washington was stepping down after leading the Continental Army to victory: "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world."

If those words don't help you to "see it new," I don't know what will. That a conquering general didn't seize power was once remarkable. That, when called once again to serve, he stepped down after eight years as president, setting a precedent that was eventually signed into law, was an amazing breakthrough. It's hard to remember that it wasn't always this way, anywhere in the world, (and still isn't, as events in Zimbabwe and Burma remind us so painfully right now.)

There's a lot wrong with our country. But there's a lot right, and looming large on the list is our capacity to change, to reinvent ourselves, to rise to great challenges and surmount them. The words of the Constitution (which were echoed by Barack Obama in his speech on race), "to form a more perfect union," remind us that perfection is a journey, the act of improvement, not an end-state. It gives me hope that we'll be willing to rediscover our idealism and tackle hard problems like global warming, global poverty and income inequality, rather than focusing on the banalities of consumer culture.

I'm reminded of a wonderful poem by Rilke, as translated by Robert Bly, The Archaic Torso of Apollo, that touches on how all greatness, all beauty calls forth from us our own aspiration:

Archaic Torso of Apollo

We have no idea what his fantastic head
was like, where the eyeballs were slowly swelling. But
his body now is glowing like a lamp
whose inner eyes, only turned down a little,

hold their flame, shine. If there weren't light, the curve
of the breast wouldn't blind you, and in the swerve
of the thighs a smile wouldn't keep on going
toward the place where the seeds are.

If there weren't light, this stone would look cut off
where it drops so clearly from the shoulders,
its skin wouldn't gleam like the fur of a wild animal,

and the body wouldn't send out light from every edge
as a star does... for there is no place at all
that isn't looking at you. You must change your life.

I remember hearing Bly read that when my daughter Arwen was a tiny baby nearly thirty years ago. The power of the unexpected turn at the end - "You must change your life." - has stayed with me ever since.

The change we seek in America starts with us. (That's why I was moved to end my talk at ETech, Why I love Hackers with another Rilke poem, about the Old Testament story of Jacob wrestling with an angel. I intended it as a kind of introduction to my son-in-law Saul Griffith's talk about the engineering challenges involved in climate change. Saul made clear just what a big job we're in for, but also grounded the scale of the required change in very personal terms, showing for example, that the amount of aluminum required to produce enough solar thermal plants is similar in scale to our current industrial production of soda cans. He did an amazing job of showing the deep relationship between global scale and personal impact.)

Bringing it back around to politics, next up on my political reading list is Susan Griffin's Wrestling with the Angel of Democracy. I was delighted to see that wonderful image of Jacob wrestling with the angel that I used in my ETech talk, the struggle with hard problems that may defeat us yet strengthen us nonetheless, applied in a political context.

I guess this Sunday ramble is a bit of an appeal to all of you, whatever your political persuasion, to wrestle with the angel of democracy in the coming election, to learn about the issues and the candidates, to make your voice heard, and to play your appointed role in the future of our government.